The tri-state area — Long Island, northern New Jersey, Westchester County and Connecticut’s Fairfield County — is holding stable post-recession and directly competing with Manhattan as it recovers, according to the Observer. Rents are up, even as vacancy rates remain steady.

In Long Island, the majority of action is in Melville and Garden City with the growth of education and health services companies. The vacancy rate for Nassau and Suffolk Counties combined was 10.3 percent at the end of the first quarter, up from the last quarter of 2010. [more]

From left: K. Thomas Elghanayan and brother Frederick started TF Cornerstone

Now that the division of Rockrose has been finalized, the two younger Elghanayan brothers are looking to snap up distressed assets. “Our plan is to look for properties that are in some form of incomplete state,” K. Thomas Elghanayan, who with his brother Frederick is now doing business under the name TF Cornerstone, told The Real Deal.
“We can take something that’s half-built and we can finish it, manage
it, rent it out, sell it, and do whatever we need to do. We’re looking
at a couple of opportunities like that, where we’d be buying these
[properties] from financial institutions.” In fact, he said, TF (for Thomas and Frederick) Cornerstone is close to making a deal on two properties in the New York metro area: one is a “broken condo,” and another is a development deal where construction started and stopped. [more]